They embraced, and parted, Facino to mount and ride away, Bellarion to await the groom who was to fetch his horse and Werner von Stoffel who was to detail the men for his special escort.
As Facino gave the word to ride, the Countess thrust her head between the leather curtains of her litter.
“Where is Bellarion?”
“He does not ride with us.”
“He doesn’t … ? You are leaving him at Abbiate?”
“No. But I have other work for him. I am sending him on a mission.”
“Other work?” Her usually sleepy eyes grew wide awake and round. “What work?”
“Nothing that will imperil him.” He spurred his horse forward to avoid further questions. “Push on there!”
They reached Milan as dusk was falling, and the snow had ceased. They entered by Porta Nuova, and went at a trot through the slush and filth of the borgo. But miraculously the word of Facino’s coming ran ahead. They found the great square thronged with people who had turned out to acclaim him.
Never yet since Gian Galeazzo’s death had it happened to Facino to enter Milan unacclaimed. But never yet had he received so terrific a manifestation of affection and good will as this. It expressed reaction from the terror sown by a rumour lately current that even Facino had at last forsaken Gian Maria’s service, leaving the people at the mercy of their maniacal Duke and of such men as della Torre and Lonate as well as of the enemies now known to be rising against them. Facino was the people’s only hope. In war he had proved himself a bulwark. In peace he had been no less their champion, for he had known how to curb the savagery of his master, and how to bring some order out of the chaos into which Gian Maria’s misrule was plunging the duchy.
His presence now in the very hour of crisis, in one of the darkest hours which Gian Maria’s dark reign had provided for them, uplifted them on wings of confidence to exaggerated heights of hope.
As the thunders of the acclamations rolled across the great square to the Old Broletto, from one of whose windows the Duke looked down upon his people, Facino, bareheaded, his fulvid hair tossed by the breeze, his square-cut, shaven face looking oddly youthful for his fifty years, smiled and nodded, whilst his Countess, drawing back the curtains of her litter, showed herself too, and for Facino’s sake was acclaimed with him.
As the little troop reached the gateway, Facino raised his eyes and met the glance of the Duke at the window above. Its malevolence dashed the glow from his spirit. And he had a glimpse of the swarthy, saturnine countenance of della Torre, who was looking over Gian Maria’s shoulder.
They rode under the gloomy archway and the jagged teeth of the portcullis, across the Court of the Arrengo and into the Court of Saint Gotthard. Here they drew up, and it was a gentleman of Milan and a Guelph, one of the Aliprandi, who ran forward to hold the stirrup of Facino the Ghibelline champion.
Facino went in his turn to assist his Countess to alight. She leaned on his arm more heavily than was necessary. She raised her eyes to his, and he saw that they were aswim in tears. In a subdued but none the less vehement voice she spoke to him.
“You saw! You heard! And yet you doubt. You hesitate.”
“I neither doubt nor hesitate,” he quietly answered. “I know where my path lies, and I follow it.”
She made a noise in her throat. “And at the window? Gian Maria and that other. Did you see them?”
“I saw. I am not afraid. It would need more courage than theirs to express in deed their hatred. Besides, their need of me is too urgent.”
“One day it may not be so.”
“Let us leave that day until it dawn.”
“Then it will be too late. This is your hour. Have they not told you so?”
“They have told me nothing that I did not know already—those in the streets and those at the window. Come, madonna.”
And the Countess, raging as she stepped beside him, from between her teeth cursed the day when she had mated with a man old enough to be her father who at the same time was a fool.
V
The Commune of Milan
“They deafen us with their acclamations of you, those sons of dogs!”
Thus the Duke, in angry greeting of the great condottiero, who was not only the last of his father’s captains to stand beside him in his hour of need, but the only one who had refrained from taking arms against him. Nor did he leave it there. “Me they distracted with their howling lamentations when I rode abroad this morning. They need a lesson in loyalty, I think. I’ll afford it them one of these fine days. I will so, by the bones of Saint Ambrose! I’ll show them who is Duke of Milan.”
There was a considerable concourse in the spacious chamber known as the Hall of Galeazzo, in which the Duke received the condottiero, and, as Facino’s wide-set, dark eyes raked their ranks, he perceived at once the influence that had been at work during his few months of absence. Here at the Duke’s elbow was the sinister della Torre, the leader of the Guelphic party, the head of the great House of the Torriani, who had striven once with the Visconti for supremacy in Milan, and in the background wherever he might look Facino saw only Guelphs, Casati, Bigli, Aliprandi, Biagi, Porri, and others. They were at their ease, and accompanied by wives and daughters, these men who two years ago would not have dared come within a mile of the Visconti Palace. Indeed, the only noteworthy Ghibelline present, and he was a man so amiably weak as to count for little in any party, was the Duke’s natural brother, Gabriello Maria, the son who
